Ballots to remain uncounted in MI and Stein blocked in Philly. Guest: Election integrity, law expert Paul Lehto says this proves 'only option is to get it right on Election Night'. Also: Trump taps climate denier, fossil-fuel tool for EPA...

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: 2012 set to be one of the hottest years on record; Sea levels rising faster than predicted; Plankton is in trouble; Does air pollution raise the risk of autism?; PLUS: EPA knocks BP out of federal contracting ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

The temporary order bans BP from competing for new oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico – such as the auction of 20m acres taking place on Wednesday – or from bidding on new contracts to supply the Pentagon or other government agencies with fuel. While the ban does not affect existing business, it raises wider questions about the company's future in a crucial market.

The Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday that BP’s suspension from new contracts would remain in effect “until the company can provide sufficient evidence to E.P.A. demonstrating that it meets federal business standards.”
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The E.P.A.’s decision appeared to take BP by surprise.

Rice’s financial holdings could raise questions about her status as a neutral decision maker. The current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Rice owns stock valued between $300,000 and $600,000 in TransCanada, the company seeking a federal permit to transport tar sands crude 1,700 miles to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast, crossing fragile Midwest ecosystems and the largest freshwater aquifer in North America.

Last October, it was revealed that the State Department contractor performing the environmental assessment of Keystone XL was deeply connected to the pipeline’s developer, TransCanada. Also in October of 2011, emails obtained from the State Department showed that officials in the agency were coaching TransCanada about how to navigate the regulatory process, raising questions about the coziness of the relationship between the two parties.

Using data from Califonia's Childhood Autism Risks from Genetics and the Environment, University of Southern California researcher Heather Volk found that pregnant women who were exposed to high levels of traffic-related air pollution were nearly three times as likely to have a child with autism as people who were in the lowest quartile of exposure.
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Scientists are split about what causes autism, but most agree that there is both a genetic and environmental component to the disease. Volk says her study suggests, but does not confirm, that air pollution may play a role in whether a child develops autism.

While all of these caveats don’t necessarily invalidate the findings, they do point to a larger issue: the need for better designed, better funded studies to determine with more finality what’s leading to the precipitous rise in autism in American children.

World Meteorological Organisation data shows average global temperature to date is 14.45C, higher than long-term average
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Although climate change sceptics may seize on the data, it does not change the long-term warming trend. Nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2001, according to the Met Office. As well as the La Niña variation, there may have been other weather effects at work.

That sea level is rising faster than expected could mean that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sea-level rise projections for the future may be biased low as well, their results suggest.

The rate of sea-level rise in the past decades is greater than projected by the latest assessments of the IPCC, while global temperature increases in good agreement with its best estimates.
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“The new findings highlight that the IPCC is far from being alarmist and in fact in some cases rather underestimates possible risks.”

"This is actually happening now," says Geraint Tarling of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. He and colleagues captured free-swimming sea snails called pteropods from the Southern Ocean in early 2008 and found under an electron microscope that the outer layers of their hard shells bore signs of unusual corrosion.

As well as warming the planet, the carbon dioxide we emit is changing the chemistry of the ocean.

China teamed with the European Union and envoys from the bloc of 48 Least Developed Countries to dial back expectations for United Nations climate talks, indicating that there probably aren’t any new promises for aid or cuts in greenhouse gases on the horizon.

What’s the climate connection? The fiscal crisis and global warming are both, to put it bluntly, problems for tomorrow. Even if Congress can’t come to an agreement to avert the fiscal cliff, the economy won’t collapse immediately and the U.S. will still be able to borrow money, just as climate change won’t render the world uninhabitable next year the world can’t reduce carbon emissions overnight anyway. As a society—and as a species—we tend not to be very good at addressing problems of tomorrow, but in one very important respect, the climate cliff and the fiscal cliff are very different.

Based on current pledges, global average temperatures could rise by three to five degrees Celsius (5.4 to 9.0 degrees Fahrenheit) this century—way above the two degrees Celsius being targeted, said a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report.

Nearly 3 years ago, the late William R. Freudenburg discussed in a AAAS presentation how new scientific findings since the 2007 IPCC report are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.”

Council members for the city of Los Angeles approved a $1.6 billion, 25-year pact Tuesday to purchase solar power from a company that will build nearly 1 million photovoltaic panels on tribal land.
..."We are going to have a solar farm and jobs for our people," Anderson, 39, said about the 320 members of the Moapa band.

In a new report issued today, the Pacific Institute released the results of a year-long analysis of the complex and controversial costs of seawater desalination. The conclusion? It is still really expensive, especially compared to alternatives.

Federal prosecutors in West Virginia charged the highest-ranking executive to date on Wednesday in a broad investigation stemming from the 2010 explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine that killed 29 miners, a move that suggests more senior executives at Massey Energy, the mine’s operator, are likely to be prosecuted.

Jordan is the world’s fourth-poorest country in terms of water resources per capita, according to the World Bank. ... Against that background, Jordan is betting heavily on a major pipeline, the Disi Water Conveyance Project, which is expected to start carrying water next year to the capital, Amman, from deep underground sources in southern Jordan, which the country shares with Saudi Arabia.

Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rainforest slowed dramatically last year as the government stepped up efforts to detect and halt illegal farming and logging, though some environmental groups warn that recent changes to the law protecting the forest might slow further progress.

Despite the overwhelming consensus among climate experts that human activity is contributing to rising global temperatures, 66 percent of Americans incorrectly believe there is "a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening." The conservative media has fueled this confusion...Media Matters looks at how conservative media outlets give industry-funded "experts" a platform, creating a polarized misunderstanding of climate science.

Human activity is affecting Earth in many ways, but a new study suggests that continued population growth and its impact on climate and ecology could trigger a more profound chain reaction of effects within little more than a decade.

Top climate scientist James Hansen tells the story of his involvement in the science of and debate over global climate change. In doing so he outlines the overwhelming evidence that change is happening and why that makes him deeply worried about the future.

It's simple: If there is to be any hope of avoiding civilization-threatening climate disruption, the U.S. and other nations must act immediately and aggressively on an unprecedented scale. That means moving to emergency footing. War footing. "Hitler is on the march and our survival is at stake" footing. That simply won't be possible unless a critical mass of people are on board. It's not the kind of thing you can sneak in incrementally.

The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever", according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.
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"The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried - if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."

Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, says there's no question that the influence of his group and others like it has been instrumental in the rise of Republican candidates who question or deny climate science. "If you look at where the situation was three years ago and where it is today, there's been a dramatic turnaround. Most of these candidates have figured out that the science has become political," he said.
...Groups like Americans for Prosperity have done it."

California may suffer the next major catastrophe if this article is prescient:

Atmospheric rivers are long streams of water vapor that form at about one mile up in the atmosphere. They are only 250 miles across but extend for thousands of miles—sometimes across an entire ocean basin such as the Pacific. These conveyor belts of vapor carry as much water as 10 to 15 Mississippi Rivers from the tropics and across the middle latitudes. When one reaches the U.S. West Coast and hits inland mountain ranges, such as the Sierra Nevada, it is forced up, cools off and condenses into vast quantities of precipitation.

(Scientific American). That could bankrupt California, the 5th largest economy on Earth, and ruin the place where much food grows:

The Central Valley is one of the world's most productive agricultural regions and is the largest patch of Class 1 soil in the world. More than 230 crops are grown there. On less than 1 percent of the total farmland in the United States, the Central Valley produces 8 percent of the nation’s agricultural output by value: 17 billion USD in 2002. Its agricultural productivity relies on irrigation from both surface water diversions and groundwater pumping from wells. About one-sixth of the irrigated land in the U.S. is in the Central Valley.

Virtually all non-tropical crops are grown in the Central Valley, which is the primary source for a number of food products throughout the United States, including tomatoes, almonds, grapes, cotton, apricots, and asparagus.

There are 6,000 almond growers that produce more than 600 million pounds a year, about 70 percent of the world's supply.

Neither the media (hello BRADBLOG.COM) or climate scientists asked if the military’s program could be contributing to climate change – even while public domain documents confirmed that “owning the weather” is a well documented military objective.

Now your blind faith, is coming home to roost, RIGHT ON YOUR FRONT PAGE.

I TOLD YOU SO!! You shunned me. Called me a DENIER even though I SAID the shit was happening all along. did you just ignore the part where I AGREED climate change is happening? Now you have a green movement enemy for LIFE.

My opinion about bradblog is, that every green-washed article is another nail in your FAKE ASS journalism coffin. Want to change this?
Do like Luke and Tim. That's the real journalism, there's a PAIR of journalists for you to aspire to. GO out and get the truth. Quit spreading these fucking UN IPCC lies.